Richard Ayres (1965, Cornish English)

Quizz: who’s a talended up-and-coming English composer starting with an A? Chances are, connoisseurs in contemporary music asked this question will answer: “Thomas Adès”. And sure Adès (born 1973) is much into the limelight. But it’s unfair to Richard Ayres, slightly his elder, and a very original composer worth following. Not that I mean to disparage Adès, I’ve enjoyed his music, but, as beautifully written as it i, it’s much “safer” and possibly even “academic” than Ayres’.

Although trained with Morton Feldman and Dutch minimalist Louis Andriessen, there’s nothing in his music that I’ve heard that recalls the minimalism of either. As the liner notes of one CD put it, “in the mid-1990s Ayres began what he described as a ‘gradual opening-up’ of his musical language. As he said at the time, ‘I want to use consonance, dissonance, melody, texture, elephants, clouds, snowballls, anything, from any time and whenever it is needed – bound only by the borders of my limited imagination’”. Ayres here is excessively modest: his imagination is large. Rowdy, evoking at times Ivesian cacophonies, demented circus music, his music is often dissonant and aggressive but always with a sense of glee and never Varesian grimness, sometimes consonant and beautiful, “modern” certainly but not in the uncompromising and forbidding manner of the serialists, modern in its willingness to embrace all and any kinds of musical languages, with no taboos. And is, in its very rowdiness, immensely fun, you can sense in Ayres the spirit of the kid banging on cans.